River City

 Field trip!  

The DHubby and I drove six hours to western Kentucky to visit this city, located at the confluence of the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers.  Paducah is a 'destination city' for quilters.  The National Quilt Museum is a source of inspiration and awe.  (Read about it at www.quiltmuseum.org.)
The murals decorate an otherwise unlovely flood wall.  One may learn more at the River Heritage Museum.

The riverfront presents an ever-changing scene.  

The City of Paducah is the home of The American Quilter's Society, which hosts an annual quilt show at the end of April.  Our visit was timed for The Calm before The Storm.  We were fortunate to enjoy nice weather for our weekend visit. 

 Paducah's historic downtown district features plenty of free parking--and even the parking lots are pretty!


Knockout roses, snapdragons, and dianthus are a cheerful greeting.

 Many of the old buildings are still occupied by long-time businesses.  The blue building is the Visitors' Center, a good source for maps, directions, or suggestions if one is a first-time visitor.  Other historic buildings house B&B's, restaurants, art galleries, gift shops. 

 The old Market building, with old brick streets on each side, is now an art gallery and gift shop.

The Art-Deco lettering gives you a hint that this bakery has been in business here for a long time.  The adjoining deli is open from 11 to 2 Monday through Saturday.  While we were on the bakery side, the postman stopped by to deliver the mail and received a cookie; nice perk!  

We make a point of stopping here every time we're in Paducah.....  we order a Reuben.  Here we have the DHubby guarding his half with a suspicious look on his face.  Possibly he thought the camera was a decoy meant to distract him while I made a grab for it.

 This was once a gallery--the walls of the entry are paved with tiles, as are many interior surfaces.  The last few times I visited, this was a restaurant; now it's a tasting and sales room for a winery.  The winemaker was there; we found him informative and congenial.  Best of all, he's plainly talented. 

The wall to the right of the couple who just happened to emerge as I took this shot.

There were too many stops...photos are not allowed in the quilt museum galleries; I did not carry my camera into Hancock's-of-Paducah (the best fabric store EVER); and we were too busy while we were enjoying meals at Cynthia's Ristorante and Max's Brick Oven Cafe (both of which we recommend; and we advise reservations.)

I hope it's not another two years before we visit again.  And this time it would be nice if we remembered the clothes on hangers that we had intended to wear when we went out to eat.

F is for February and Feathers

Quilting Goddess Diane Gaudynski has a tutorial on quilted feather designs at SewCalGal's site.  Feathers have always intimidated me, but they have their uses, and therefore I have decided to meet this challenge head on.  Fortunately, I have a layered piece that I abandoned 11 or 12 years ago; it's not worth finishing, but it is perfect for practicing; it has nowhere to go but UP.  I drew a set of curvy lines and free-motion quilted the feather below.  For a first attempt, it's not so bad.  

This feather was quilted with 'invisible thread.'  There are a couple of really bad spots--one of which I tried to 'rescue' by adding 'pearls.'  (Photo below.)  If this were a serious piece, I would be ripping stitches out right now.  But it's not, and I'm not. 

 The picture to the left is the back of the work; I have a cotton thread in the bobbin, which seems to agree with the machine better than having the invisible poly for both upper and lower threads.  


If I sit down every day (or as close to that as I can manage) I may have a new skill by the end of the month!  

Signature Quilt

I finished this quilt in late 2011, just in time for our annual guild challenge.  (Conway Quilters meets monthly September through May at the home of Irma Gail Hatcher.  If you Google her name, you will learn that she is deservedly famous for her work.)  

I received a gift of 12 signature blocks from my Ohio 'bee'--a small group of quilters who met every Friday at the Chagrin Falls Library to work and learn together.  It was a wonderful inspiration and helped me grow as a quilter.  It's a little embarrassing to admit it took me 10 years to turn these blocks into a quilt, but I'm pleased with the results.  I designed the setting, pieced the quilt (remaking a few of the blocks) and quilted this on my home sewing machine.  The reds and greens seemed very 'Christmas-y' to me, and the signatures brought faces to mind, so this is named 'Memories at Christmas.'

 

What to do, what to do?

Winter weather and workers interfere with backyard activities...and what's a gardener to do?  The obvious answer is to attend to an indoor hobby.....and happily, quilting fits the bill.  I am working to improve my machine-quilting skills on my home sewing machine.  It's essential to warm up before working on my current quilt, so I layer a small 'quilt sandwich'--backing, batting, and marked top--and spend a few minutes following lines or adding fill--which is the term for quilting that fills (and flattens) empty space, giving the quilt added texture and visual interest.

 A quilting blog named SewCalGal is featuring a machine-quilting tutorial every month of 2012.  The January instructional video showed a leaf motif.  I changed the design a little and worked on a small scale, filling a curved space.

This fill design is called 'Dianeshiko,' for Diane Gaudynski-- one of the gifted individuals who has raised machine quilting to (literally) an art.

 After a week or so of warm-up exercises, one has a small sampler like this!  The inevitable imperfections are less noticeable in the overall view.  To enlarge, click Ctrl + (Control plus).


Diane Gaudynski tells us that our quilting gets better every day.  Hope so!

Field Trip!

Tomorrow I'm headed off early to Fort Smith (the western border of Arkansas, where one can cross into Oklahoma just like Mattie Ross in 'True Grit.'  Only the river is quite a bit wider and deeper than that.)  

Why am I going there?  Quilt Congress!  --an annual gathering of quilters and quilt guilds, not to mention vendors and speakers, a trunk show, and a competition.  A few years ago our guild hosted this meeting in Little Rock; (I helped ahead of time, but was traveling and missed the actual day.) QC moves to a different part of the state each year.  I have entered quilts in a couple of the shows--and won a couple of ribbons--but this year's theme, 'Americana,' did not send me even if I'd had time to make an entry.  (The 'Mean Old Lady' self-portrait won a Viewer's Choice for the theme 'Quilters on Fire; it was instant inspiration.) 

Update:
I had a smooth 2-hour drive west and a delightful day--excellent lecturer, inspiring quilts--but didn't take a single picture.  I wasn't in a good spot for pix.  Sorry!  You can type in a Search for Jan Patek and view her quilts at her 'store.'  Jan is a 'primitive' quilter, living on a Missouri farm--her life had quite a few parallels with mine, which added to the fun.  I even won a door-prize (a bluebird box!  How apropos for me!)  The drive home wasn't bad--thank heavens for NPR and 'Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers!' 

Otherwise Engaged

I haven't been snowed in, but I might agree to 'slightly snowed under.'  

The new wrinkle in a lot of Baby Boomers' lives will make this sound familiar:  DHubby's mother relocated from Florida when she turned 80; it's been six and a half years, and although she's apparently indestructible, last year she needed to make a move into assisted living.  After  contracting an intestinal virus that hit the facility's residents, she developed double pneumonia, so I put up my 'Daughter-in-law On Duty' sign--about ten days of activity there, but not much that was blog-worthy.  

A brief warm-up (temps in the 60's) gave me some opportunities to work further in the yard--getting things ready for spring and spruced up a bit.  There is more to do, but a change in the weather is predicted.  Our drought continues, so rain would be welcome. 

And I've been doing 2+ miles a day on the treadmill--paring off the holiday pounds and trying to continue losing excess weight--help with the old cholesterol count and hypertension.  (Being very slim most of my life was poor preparation for the Bad News After Fifty.)  

AND I am trying to put some daily time into machine quilting.  One famous quilter described this skill as akin to rubbing your tummy and patting your head while dancing on the head of a pin--there really is a lot to master.  The quilt being subjected (sacrificed?) to my learning curve was made from farewell blocks given to me by one of my Ohio guilds.  There are 19 Ohio Star blocks; no two are alike, and in fact no two were the same size either.  (Not all of the contributors were experienced quilters.)  I did develop a design that combined all of these blocks and solved the size-disparity problem, and then I hit a snag--how to quilt it?  I've had such bad luck sending quilts to 'professional' machine quilters, that I decided:  Heck.  I could mess up this quilt all by myself!

The set-up:  three tables in a corner

 Here is my machine-quilting set-up.  The sewing table abuts two other tables so that the weight of the (large) quilt is supported.  It's an adventure to work on the central areas of the quilt with a domestic sewing machine. 










This post looked fine on Preview, but the formatting is wonky when I hit Publish. Sorry!  Scroll down.

Basically, one must fold or roll the section of the quilt to the right of the target block and cram it into the machine's throat area.  Here, I'm preparing to stitch the background sections of a block.  (In the lower right you can see the motif that has been quilted.)

The gloves have tacky finger-tips that help the quilter control the part of the quilt that is going under the needle.  These are 'Machingers,' the brand that works for me.  The blue coloring is from the quilt markings, which will wash away when the quilt is finished and laundered.  The picture below was meant to display the blue wash-out markings, but I'm not sure they show up very well.  

Stay tuned...I'll be working on this project for quite some time to come.....